Radio Nowhere

This afternoon I watched a particularly bad episode of the X Files and listened to the radio simultaneously. Not wanting to state this simple and frankly expected tedious Sunday afternoon activity as any kind of triumph of mankind, but I did come over a big H.G. Wells queer because what I was doing was such a late nineties past time, that I felt like I’d momentarily opened a time wormhole back into the end of the last decade. If you ignore the fact I was watching X-Files online on a laptop, I was listening to Stephen Merchant on a digital radio, and eating a flavour of Pot Noodle that only people watching the 1996 Olympics could dream about in apocalyptic nights of terror, then part of it was true.

The X files episode was ‘Roland’ a twins-channelling-energy-post-mortem shocker in which a scientist who’d popped his clogs early into some massively boring laboratory experiment into the speed of sound could ‘live on’ (despite being cryogenically frozen in a vat of gases) through the acts of his ‘special’ twin brother, Roland. By special, I mean thick as a plank at a Kasabian concert; when the twins had their IQs divvied out at birth, captain dead arse clearly got the lion and tigers share, whilst poor Roland ended up with the cranial capacity of a yodelling potato. This didn’t of course stop the spooky shit going down X-style, so Roland was sent on a mercy mission to exonerate every other scientist involved in these massively boring laboratory experiments by getting half of them to have a closer look at a wind tunnel with their faces, and the other bundling head first into some liquid nitrogen and then standing on his ear. So far so good. The innumerable number of flaws in this episode are made apparent by the acts of Mulder and Scully, who do a stupendous number of “calming down” interviews with Roland all of which made my mind shut down the second they started. Then of course, you have the major downer that the one character you want to speak out is held back by the fact that Scully flushing her toilet makes a closer approximation to the English language than poor Roland does. The climax of the episode comes when the parody of a stereotype of a parody of an English tea-and-crumpets professor (the action-packed one because he doesn’t wear glasses, of course) tries to shoot Roland only he doesn’t. The sheer fact that this episode is rehash of episode shown literally only weeks earlier goes to prove what a mish-mash of underwhelming bits this episode was. And to think, when the good doctor with the beard got sent to meet his maker on a prop from a Backstreet Boys video during the teaser, I sincerely had my hopes up.

No such problems over on the radio though, as I dedicated more than ten minutes of my life to it for the first time in what felt like months. There were several good things that came from it, which might have otherwise gone a miss. Radio Nowhere by Bruce Springsteen, is precisely the sort of comeback single you want from The Boss. Now, I enjoyed Devils and Dust as the pretty-good-but-still-one-of-his-worst stop-gaps that it was, and enjoyed the Seeger Sessions for what it technically was; a big piss-up round Bruce’s that probably went too far but was a bit of a laugh none the less, but the meat is obviously in a new E Street band collaboration, which Radio Nowhere clearly has slapped all over it’s chops like a child stinking of candy floss. Unashamedly macho, but sadly closer to The Rising than any of the nitty, gritty seventies top-of-his-game Boss, but for something I was admittedly reserved about, consider it job done, now let’s hope the rest of ‘Magic’ works just as well. There were also good tracks by Georgie James, who I thought was going to be a boring woman signed to Saddle Creek who would ultimately have as little impact on my life as the two faceless voids that used to be in Azure Ray would, but I pleasantly found them out to be a duo featuring the drummer from Q and not U. Who I don’t have an opinion on. Who else features? Oh, After Steven Merchant finished, Stuart Maconie took over, and what’s brilliant about his show on Radio 6 is that he does generally play the most pleasant inappropriate music for Sunday afternoon possible. For example, his ‘tribute’ to Tony Wilson, (who I’d readily admit I have no fucking time for whatsoever because of his red handed responsibilities in ‘Step On’ by the Happy Mondays still being on general rotation in shitty indie clubs across Britain) was to play the full 17 minute version of Elegia by New Order, which consists of about four notes, no vocals, predated Spacemen 3 by about four years and would still sleep with your sister. Awe-some. There was also something by Flowers of Hell, which is essentially the cooing lady vocals from ‘Girls’ by Death in Vegas overlayed onto a lost Belle and Sebastian album closer, and if as a band they’re not regulars in the same greasy spoons and lending libraries north of the border as Camera Obscura, Ballboy and B+S then I’ll eat my kilt, sporran and pathetic little tartan bobble hat.